Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional [Paperback]

The book is overall well written, however the series title is misleading. I could have easily labeled this 3 stars.

PROS:
- Well written. (Few tech authors have this skill)
- Overall good cover of the basics
- Full code is provided, author has a forum where he answers some questions.
- He shows good code practices

CONS:
- This book should be in the series: "From Novice to having some understanding". It does not cover ACL at all, and the cover of the basic Auth component is incredibly basic and lacking. Most of the examples are very simple, so you won't be getting to be a "Professional" with this book. The tile is ok "Beginning CakePHP" but by no means expect this book to cover in depth topics of challenging issues.
- The book is one big project that keeps adding on things - which is good. But the author decided to go for a Blog... Please another application? Pretty please? There are about a million blog tutorials out there, he could have gone the extra mile by giving us an interesting (i.e realistic) project. There is already a good blog tutorial on the cakephp.org site. Yes, the author does take the blog further in this book (he better, it's 300 pages) but still.
- Not the author's fault - but be warned that the book is for RC1 - and believe me, you will struggle figuring out why the provided code is not working and why so many errors (if you are using RC2 or beyond).
- All the examples except 1 are straight out of the box CAKEPHP built in things - which is fine, but real projects usually require you to stretch things, change some models to be used differently.
- The "Advanced features" chapter is a joke. It spends less than 1 page in most of those advance features. Basically, you are on your own. And a whopping of 6 pages on the forms helper. (Web applications live on forms, a whole book could be written on the topic).

I gave it 4 stars for being a clearly written book on CakePHP, but don't expect this book will be more than an introduction, with a few nice gems.

This book is not an instruction manual on CakePHP. It's really an overview, with a little CakePHP thrown in. It is for an old version of CakePHP, you'll get many errors that you'll have no idea how to solve if you use a current version of CakePHP. It's both wordy on preaching about Cake's pluses and too dense and assumes the reader knows things about Cake you turn to books like this for. It fails at explaining syntax of CakePHP. It fails at giving examples. It fails at all but the most basic, rudimentry tasks. This is more like: "CakePHP: From Novice to 'I kinda get it.'"

The Author explains how things work but neglects to show the reader the proper syntax is some cases, often leaving more advanced configuration answers out of the book. He'll tell you about a parameter but not show a single line of code that explains the syntax needed to activate it. Excerpt: "For more control, you may want to enter more parameters for the "has many" Relationship:" Where to enter those parameters? I have no idea.

Also, this is supposed to be a tutorial book and the author leave us to our own devices to construct relationships in cake when we've never used Cake, saying, "Just follow the association rules" which aren't laid out clearly in the chapter that handles them.

The meat of the book is a bit better, but explains things in reverse order. Instead of giving us an example, and then explaining it, he explains everything then gives us an example.

Routing is another mystery to me still since the author shows you the default routes but then glosses over other routes, expecting you to know the implications of what he's failed to clearly explain.

Also, this book uses one example -- a blog -- the entire book. This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that there's a free CakePHP blog tutorial online. But really this book is simply a tough way to learn CakePHP. Save you money and look elsewhere.

I have been programming with PHP and CakePHP for 2 months. Like many I was informed that I could find everything on the internet that I need to know. Though the information on the internet gives you the code and some detailed explanations on how to build site blog post and catalog sites, it does not do a highly effective job at describing how all of the components of CakePHP work together. I am not talking about the controllers, models and views. Though I am familiar with OPP and have written programs in other languages, as well as developing website with CakePHP for the past two months, I was not grasping how CakePHP SQL code was configured nor was I grasping how all of the components of CakePHP interact for trouble shooting all of the code that was written by someone else, that was not working, without any documentation or comments in complex areas of the code. This book has been a great asset to move my understanding along to where I now can zip through the complicated code written by another, make the necessary adjustments or rewrites to get the code to run smoothly and with less coding.

I recommend this book to anyone who is new to CakePHP. It is a great foundational explanation book and is easy to follow. I have read many programming books in many languages, many leave out so much information, others are too wordy. This book is well balanced in its explanations of how CakePHP works and how to use the system. This book is not a cook book or a book of code examples as it clearly explains in the beginning of the book. If you are looking of code for PHP try PHP Phrases, or Larry Ullman's books on PHP. I have not found a complete reference book on PHP that meets my criteria of a book of books on PHP. Remember this is a book for understanding the nuts and bolts on how CakePHP works and why it is so great it is not a book on PHP coding. This is one of the best books I have read. The explanations are clear and there is sample code sufficient to go with the explanations.

I only wish there was a book with this information and more advanced information in one book.
This book is not large and can easily be read over a week as time permits.